Federation Commander

Don't forget that the script writers basically make it up as they go along. The 'original' onscreen stuff is nowhere near as consistent as the SFU that we 'inhabit'!

For example, a bit off-topic but does anyone remember the TNG episode 'Relics'where they beam out through shields?

They probably had some techno-jargon excuse of the type script writers adore, justifying why on this one occasion they could beam through shields when normally it's a big and widely acknowledged no-no. generally, if the script writers can't think of another way of doing it how they want it in the storyline, they have to make up something to explain it away. This in itself wouldn't be problematic were they consistent in these changes they make, but in reality they end up contradicting themselves over what you can and can't do and how things work, etc.. In other words, they make it up as they go along.

But then they're relying on the point that only geeks like us would notice. And we don't count anyway.

And anyway, no, they didn't metion why they could do it. They just flagrantly ignored the prohibition on beaming through shields, something that was established by Mr. G. R. [his name's probably copyright ] in his book 'The Making of $tar Tr3k'

The other problem is, much like James Bond's gadgets, the concept is used once and then never used again. In fact I believe the beaming through shields concept is also used in the TNG episode where O'Brien's former captain is convinced the Cardassians are preparing for war; they technobabble it away in that episode IIRC by claiming that the shields recycle every few hundred milliseconds and if you time it just right you can squeeze through in the recycle period. Something like that anyway.....though of course it was never used again (except perhaps in Relics, albeit without explicit mention).

How do they factor the few seconds it takes to beam in/out of a ship into that few millisecond gap? Whenever you see them transporting in the TV shows they always have a sparkly fading period where people gradually appear/disappear. No doubt they've got a technobabble-licious excuse for that one too.

Also couldn't the enemy take advantage of the recycling shields thing?

Davec_24 wrote:How do they factor the few seconds it takes to beam in/out of a ship into that few millisecond gap? Whenever you see them transporting in the TV shows they always have a sparkly fading period where people gradually appear/disappear. No doubt they've got a technobabble-licious excuse for that one too.

If not, I'll make one up here and now.

The 'dissolving' bit is where the transportees are broken down and stored into the pattern buffer. Then the pattern is transmitted in the 'millisecond' [jeez that's some bandwidth!] and reassembled at the other end.

The thing I can't technobabble around is the time taken to reassemble on the receiving end, unless it's done transporter - to - transporter where it would be stored in the receiving unit's pattern buffer. That does appear to take time, and unless the transmitter can 'see' the beam-in site for the whole time, someone's gonna end up more scrambled than your eggs were on Sunday....

Davec_24 wrote:Also couldn't the enemy take advantage of the recycling shields thing?

The excuse there would be that you 'know' your own shields' cycle times, whereas you don't know the enemy's [and he doesn't know yours either]. You can therefore synchronise your own timing with your own shields, but not with the enemy's.

Just shows how long I've been making excuses for Tr3k scriptwriters

Well, what if you're beaming a boarding party straight into a corridor, etc. (like they do fairly often) - it still seems to take time to re-assemble the particles, it seems - more than the millisecond scale gap that's available anyway. Well, they should have just written the story so they didn't *have* to beam through shields in the first place, instead of doing it wrong and then trying to make it sound like it was all fair enough. But hey, that's how the world works...